Carolina Alumni Review - March/April 2007

are becoming
as much a part
of our heritage as
a slave narrative
or a senator’s
papers. We have
to find the
technological
means and the
capacity to bring
that material

in and know
enough about it
so we can keep
it available for
the future.’

Rich Szary
associate University
librarian for special
collections and director
of Wilson Library

for special collections and director of Wilson Library. “We have to find the technological means and the capacity to bring that material in and know enough about it so we can keep it available for the future.”

Challenges abound. “Most databases are put in some proprietary format somewhere,” Jones noted. “And five years from now you can’t get it back. Suppose you were doing a drug trial. The NSF and the NIH are going to require that this information be kept alive, that it be preserved, and that the anonymity of the individual subjects be preserved. You have security issues, you have privacy issues and you have preservation issues. Databases are a really tough knot.”

Even the ready availability of compact digital media creates a challenge. “It gets cheaper every year to store digital material,” Szary said. “We have more on our desktops now than major computer centers had 20 or 30 years ago. That does change your thinking. In the past, we had to think about how many shelves we had. Shelves are very finite. Adding a disk drive isn’t that big a deal. We have to be careful we’re still making the appropriate selection decisions.”

Speaking of shelves, what do all these changes mean for the library as a physical space, as what Marchionini calls “the cathedral of academe”? Quiet, grandeur — and restrictions on food and drink — still exist on campus, in Wilson Library’s hushed, high-ceilinged reading rooms, for instance.

Books won’t disappear anytime soon, librarians agree, and neither will the desire to congregate with other scholars in a milieu that promotes inquiry, reflection, exchange and mutual support. “The number of people visiting and using the library continues to go up,” noted Joe Hewitt, University librarian emeritus.

And UNC’s libraries will continue to acquire books and other items available only in print. They’ll still make space for unique and rare physical materials, even in a far-off, rosy future when every last one of them has been digitized. “The original would still be available to a researcher who needs to see it,” Szary said. “There’s still that evocative sense these things bring to people when they can see and touch an original manuscript, an original map, an original photograph.”

A traditionalist may raise an eyebrow at coffee-toting students chatting over their laptops in the library, but Jones thinks the scene fits with the vision of Andrew Carnegie, who created nearly 2,000 free libraries in the U.S. and donated the money with which SILS was founded. “How we think of libraries today is pretty much defined by Carnegie,” Jones said. “He saw them as social centers for the self-improvement of society. If you see them as that rather than as warehouses for texts, libraries are on a very good trajectory.”

Graduate students work on electronic archiving for DocSouth projects in Wilson Library. DocSouth is making Carolina’s formidable resources in Southern history and folklore available outside the library’s walls. Rather than reduce the number of people who want to see the collection’s documents in person, as had been feared, it has had the opposite effect: Users want to see what they’ve peeked at online. At far right above is DocSouth Director Natasha Smith ’ 95 (MSLS).